Naming "temporary directors" | General | Forum

I heard back today from Ariel Waldman, who runs spacehack.org, about my submission of CSTART.

She asked:

I am unable to find a list of names/emails for the creators/coordinators
behind CSTART – can you provide this as well or point me to a URL that has
it listed?

Which was a little hard for me to answer, since CSTART doesn't really have a clearly defined list of creators/coordinators at yet.

While I think our open and decentralised nature is important and good, it is a little inconvenient to have nobody in any kind of official position.

It's no secret that 5 people do 90% of what goes on here, and while we don't act like it, we are sort of "in charge" by default, by virtue of having the passwords to accounts and having admin status on forums/wikis/whatever.  How do we feel about naming ourselves something like "temporary directors" or maybe "official representative" or some such, so that there are at least some official points of contact into what little authority structure CSTART has?  This would, of course, be an entirely temporary situation, which would end once the non-profit was set up and there were genuine board members / officers to list.

I have given Ariel the names and email addresses (@cstart.org addresses) of the core 5 but asked her not to put them on the site until I check with you guys to make sure you are all (1) comfortable having your names listed at cstart.org (see the entry on Open Luna for a taste of what this would look like) and (2) happy with the "temporary director" or whatever title/concept.  If anybody doesn't want to have themselves listed in this capacity at spacehack.org please do not be afraid to speak up and I'll make sure Ariel knows this.  If anybody can think of a better name than "temporary director" that they'd like to go by, let me know and I'll pass that on soon.

Hopefully once we have some names to act as contact points, CSTART will be listed at spacehack.org and we may see some new members turning up! :)

Would "acting director" sound less dismissable than "temporary director"?

I'm not averse to defining specific titles for various roles, but we'd need to figure out who would get what title which may take a while, and also makes things a little less flexible.  I suppose if we did go down this route it would be sensible to list Rizwan as webmaster.

Thanks for everyone getting back to me on this so quickly.

I've let Ariel know that everyone is happy for their name and @cstart.org email address to be published.  I've asked that we be called "acting directors" for now (this seems to be a more official sounding term than "temporary directors" – it wins quite handily in a google fight).  If we want to decide upon individual positions over the next few days in such a way that everybody is happy with their role and nobody feels we are acting too much like dictators then we can always ask nicely to have the listing updated.

Hopefully we'll be on spacehack.org soon!  I don't know how much traffic spacehack.org gets, but Ariel herself seems like a very impressive person (from her bio: "In 2008, she was named one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley. Previously, she was a CoLab program coordinator at NASA") so there's some chance of getting good, targetted word-of-mouth advertising now that she knows about us, although of course it's not something we can count on.